15 comments:

Hi Tim, if you find any old spanners/sockets or stainless steel bolts etc hiding away in the black sludge, make sure you have a good look at the hull where they had been laying. I work on a 1968 built ex royal navy dive tender (Datchet), and the only problems we have ever found with her hull bottom plates have been where old spanners/stainless bolts etc have been laying in the black sludge for years. Electrolysis can set in in those areas. We found a couple of pits about 5mm deep under a couple of stainless nuts that had obviously been hiding in the deepest part of the bilge for years.Sorry to hear about your 'hit and run' incident, have you thought about visiting the 'MAIB' website and downloading a report form?

I once looked at buying a separator from the same people that make milking machinery, their name ( alfa Laval ) they have a piece of kit that separates the water from the fat in milk and with ajustment it will sort the muck out grom the water of a bilge, so with an industrial pump to get the bilge water to the separator and a tank to hold it there for a few minutes whilst the "spinner" does its work, and all you are left with is oil, a few dirty cones and a lot of clear water. Actually I am surprised that you don`t have a saparator on the vessel already as many of the commercial vessels I have worked on have them as a matter of course for the fuel purification. In the future you may consider having one and attaching it to the lowest point in your tank system just to keep your fuel polished. They are available second hand, and they are a very un-sung piece of kit actually. there is another make but I can`t remember their name

This won't be useful for your situation T, but you might like to know what our naughty gonzo solution for Wendy Ann was. after removing the water we filled our bilges with woodshavings. Left it for a couple of days, returned to shovel it all into rubble sacks and took it to be incinerated (illegal). The shavings absorbed all the oil and had the effect of coagulating the heavier filth enough to enable us to handle it. In our case it worked extremely well, although we had all the sole plates up and no machinery to hinder our efforts. Side effect was that the engine room smelt like a hamster cage.On Storebror we use a water based bilge wash called Marinol, made by the same people who do jizer. Its supposedly an environmentally friendly way of dealing with this sort of thing, but I'm not convinced. I believe it has quick-splitting properties similar to Jizer. BTW, I can also confirm the electrolysis danger from foreign objects lying against hull. Wendy was full of 'em. Good thing we replaced all the plates at the bottom then.Good luck and happy procrastination. S.

Never hoover fuel, oil or solvent. The fumes pass through the motor and specifically through the commutator which is alive with hot blue electrical sparks when the thing is running. You will have 2-metre flames out the exhaust port of your vacuum.